2012 4th International Conference on Intelligent and Advanced Systems (ICIAS2012)
Implementation of Cascade Control for Wheeled
Mobile Robot Straight Path Navigation
K.H. Ng, C.F. Yeong, E.L.M. Su
Faculty of Electrical Engineering,
Universiti Teknologi Malaysia
81310 Skudai, Johor, Malaysia
Abstract - A cascade controller was proposed for mobile robot
navigation because of the simplicity of control algorithm. For a
robot that requires to only complete straight path navigation, the
cascade controller is an attractive solution. Compared to typical
mobile robot navigation algorithms, this cascade control does not
need any path tracking control and only uses simple PID for
navigation. For each mobile robot wheels, a position PID
controller is cascaded to a velocity PID controller. An additional
PID controller is added in between both wheels to make sure the
mobile robot moves in a straight path. An experiment was done
on a differential drive robot and results were presented.
I. INTRODUCTION
Navigation of wheeled mobile robot usually includes path
planning and path tracking. For path planning, the acceleration
and deceleration profile is considered and the trajectory is
generated in a Cartesian coordinate.
Thereafter, control laws are developed to track this
trajectory. There are several examples where linear controllers
were used, for example in [1], PID controller was used to track
the heading of a synchronous robot based on desired
trajectory. While in [2], PI controller with feedforward
compensator was used to track the desired trajectory.
Figure 1. Part of game field for the contest
978-1-4577-1967-7/12/$26.00 ©2011 IEEE
A.R. Husain
Centre for Student Innovation,
Office of Undergraduate Studies,
Universiti Teknologi Malaysia
81310 Skudai, Johor, Malaysia
There are cases where nonlinear controllers were used in
trajectory tracking like [3] where the dynamic tracking
stabilization was analysed using Lyapunov function while [4]
used sliding mode controller for the tracking of nonholonomic
mobile robot.
All given examples above involve a planned desired path
and a control law so that the mobile robot will navigate
according to the planned path. All these algorithms are either
simulations or implemented in a computer.
In the ABU ROBOCON [5], mobile robots are required to
navigate throughout the field. Universiti Teknologi Malaysia
has participated in this competition and developed automatic
mobile robots for the game. The automatic robot has the
ability to move in straight path on the game field as shown in
Fig. 1.
Due to the implementation of mobile robot programming in
microcontroller, the above mentioned methods are impractical
due to computation time and memory. Therefore, a cascade
controller was proposed where only the desired position and
velocity are fed into the controller and the mobile robot will
move in a straight path. There is no path tracking control
needed for this method and the tracking only involves the
cascade controller which makes it quite easy to be
implemented in a microcontroller.
The differential drive wheeled mobile robot kinematic
model is used to analyse the robot posture in world frame. In
other words, it is used to show where the mobile robot has
travelled. Experiments were conducted to validate the
proposed cascaded controller. Conclusion and
recommendation for future works are presented at the end of
the paper.
II. WHEELED MOBILE ROBOT KINEMATIC MODEL
Mobile robots can be classified to many types based on the
degree of steerability and degree of mobility [6]. The type
(2,0) was chosen because of the simple kinematic model used
and the simplicity in robot fabrication.
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 2012 4th International Conference on Intelligent and Advanced Systems (ICIAS2012)
Figure 2. Mobile robot posture used in this experiment
A differential drive robot is classified under type (2,0). The
model for this differential drive robot posture is used in many
mobile robot [2], [4], [7]. As shown in Fig. 2, the mobile robot
consists of two wheeled placed in parallel and from the
encoder readings, the forward kinematics can be used to obtain
the position of the robot in the Cartesian coordinate frame.
As the algorithm in a microcontroller uses the numerical
computation, the forward kinematics will be implemented
using the Euler equations based on the formula in [7]. The
equations are:
r (ω r + ω l ) r (ω r + ω l )
v= ,ω =
2 d
where r is the radius of the wheel and d is the distance of
both wheels, ω r and ωl are both right and left wheel velocity.
xk +1 = xk + vk Ts cos(θ k )
y k +1 = yk + vk Ts sin(θ k )
θ k +1 = θ k + ωk Ts
where Ts is the fixed sampling time.
This kinematic model is used only as an analysis method for
this experiment because the model does not influence the
controller output to the actuators.
III. CASCADE CONTROLLER
Cascaded PID controller can be found in many literatures in
water level control where the inner loop represents the flow
control and while the outer loop represents the level control.
Based on [8], [9] cascade control has the advantage of faster
response and better disturbance rejection.
The proposed controller for straight path navigation consists
of a pair of controller for each wheel. Each pair will have a
PID controller for position and a PID controller for velocity.
The position controller output will be saturated to a desired
velocity before being fed into the velocity controller. The
proposed controlled is shown in Fig. 3.
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Figure 3. Cascaded controller scheme
(1)
Figure 4. Full system for the mobile robot navigation
By doing so, the mobile robot will move to a desired
position in a straight path with a desired velocity. This
(2) condition is possible if the desired position is relatively larger
(3) than then desired velocity.
An additional PID controller is added into the system to
(4)
compensate for position difference. The controller is inserted
in between the two controllers like shown in Fig. 4. This type
of compensation is coined in [10] where only an integrator
was used. But for better control, a full PID is used for this
purpose.
IV. EXPERIMENTAL RESULTS
For the experiment, a robot was fabricated from aluminum
bars, direct current motors and quadrature encoders. The total
weight of the robot is 8.6 kg with length of 0.5m and wheels
distance of 0.7m. The robot is shown in Fig. 5. The robot will
move on vinyl flooring as required by the ABU ROBOCON
contest.
The cascade controller is implemented in a microcontroller
using the UTM team’s motor control board where the cascade
control, encoder interface and motor actuation are
programmed in a dsPIC33FJ128MC802 microcontroller. The
feedback was obtained from quadrature encoders attached to
the ground and the actuators are 41 Watt direct current motors.
 2012 4th International Conference on Intelligent and Advanced Systems (ICIAS2012)

Firstly, the inner loop of the cascade controller, which is the

velocity controller, was tuned.. The tuning method applied is
online trial and error method. The desired speed will be fed
with 0.5 m/s for two seconds thhen, 0.1 m/s for 4 seconds. The
response graph is shown in Fig. 6.
After that, the outer loop waas tuned to perform the straight
path navigation for the mobilee robot. Again, online trial and
error tuning method was usedd. The desired position is two
meters and the desired speed saaturation was set to 1.5 m/s.
The response graph is show wn in Fig. 7. The mobile robot
exhibits acceleration and decelleration profile which is similar
to typical mobile robot navigation with trapezoidal velocity
profile. This can be seen from m the velocity graph. And the
desired velocity is closed to thee desired velocity of 1.5 m/s.
Figure 5. Actual robot used for the expeeriment.
To analyze the position of o mobile robot in Cartesian
coordinate, the kinematic moddel was used and the position is
shown in Fig. 8.
Thereafter, the position diffference controller structure was
tested. Desired position of twoo meters and desired velocity of
0.5 m/s was fed into the conttroller. While the mobile robot
was navigating, external forces were exerted to the robot for
three times.

Figure 6. Mobile robot velocity responsee graph

Figure 8. Robot posturee in Cartesian coordinate

Figure 7. Mobile robot position responsee graph

Figure 9. Position respponse with disturbance

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 2012 4th International Conference on Intelligent and Advanced Systems (ICIAS2012)
The position response graph was shown inn Fig. 9. From the
robot position plot, both wheels were com mpensated so they
move in the same position. As shown in thhe velocity graph,
there are oscillations but the average still remains
r about 0.5
m/s. In other words, the position difference controller
c is trying
to compensate for the difference by adjusting the velocity of
both motors.
Again, to view the robot posture in the Carrtesian coordinate,
the kinematic model was used to calculate the t robot position.
This is shown in Fig. 10. Even there are sliight deviations out
of the straight path, it was compensated backk.
The weakness of this controller is it will not be able to reject
large disturbance in the path, e.g. a distuurbance caused by
robot-to-robot collision. This disturbance will
w make the robot
deviate too much from the straight path and the robot will not
know of it, ending up moving in a path parallel with the
original intended path, offset by a certain disstance. This case is
depicted in Fig. 11. This shows the weaknness in open loop
navigation scheme compared to closed loop navigation for
example in [11].
Figure 10. Robot posture in movement with disturbances
d Siciliano, A. Bicchi, and P. Vaaligi, Eds. Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer
Figure 11. Example of deviation from intended pathh due to disturbance
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V. CONCLUSION AND
D FUTURE WORKS
A cascade controller was prroposed and implemented for a
mobile robot to move in a straaight path. This algorithm only
needs desired position and veloocity for straight path movement
to be executed, as compared too navigation that involved path
tracking control. The computaation for wheeled mobile robot
navigation can be reduced siggnificantly. As for the tracking,
only PID controller was used annd the implementation is simple
relatively to various tracking allgorithm [1–4].
For future works, the mobilee robot model will be identified
using system identification toools. Proper PID tuning method
should be used like the Zieglerr-Nichols tuning method [12] to
optimize the PID gains. Sinnce the controlling does not
involved tracking, the Ziegler--Nichols tuning method should
be sufficient.
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